In Rough Country

April 26, 2010
A bad joke says writing is easy if you don’t know how to do it. This collection is a personal appreciation and piercing analysis of those who do it sublimely: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Jean Stafford, Roald Dahl (considered in his adult work), Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Claire Messud, and others. Oates is drawn to writers and themes that inform her own work, such as the gothic, the satiric, feminist theory, and a humanist bent that seems to have gone out of fashion. Readers of the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or TLS will be familiar with these essays (though sometimes in different form or with different titles), divided into three parts—“Classics,” “Contemporaries,” and “Nostalgias.” Some essays—on the smothered brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer; on boxing; on Annie Leibovitz—are not strictly literary. In the Nostalgias section, Oates skewers American jingoism, notes the influence of Lewis Carroll on childhood, and returns to her source, Lockport, N.Y. Oates attributes the book’s existence to the death of her husband of 48 years (reading gave shape to her “uncharted life as a widow”), but it is inspired as much by the subjects Oates so astutely describes.

May 1, 2010
A poignant, nostalgic collection of literary criticism by one of America's premier authors, gathered in the aftermath of her husband's recent death.

After 48 years of marriage, the author's husband, Ontario Review founder and editor Raymond Smith, died unexpectedly in February 2008. In a remarkably forthright and moving preface, Oates (A Fair Maiden, 2010, etc.) explains the emotionally fraught"rough terrain" from which many of these essays derived. For example, because she was working on"Boxing: History, Art, Culture" when her husband passed away, she could return to the essay"only sporadically, with a residual sort of excitement, as there might be observed, in the waning light of the iris of the eye of a decapitated beast." In these selections, divided into"Classics" (e.g., Poe, Dickinson, Malamud),"Contemporaries" (Updike, Doctorow, Rushdie, Atwood) and"Nostalgias" ("Nostalgia 1970: City on Fire"), the author effectively combines her highly tuned sensibilities, sharp research and concise, vivid prose. As a fiction writer of the highest order, Oates shares her subjects' writerly obsessions with mortality, loss and death. She recalls, for example, the oeuvre of Poe and its effect on her own early work, and of Emily Dickinson, who offered a"fusion of female stoicism and pragmatism." The author writes that Annie Leibovitz's recent book of photographs containing excruciating shots of her dying friend Susan Sontag has the"heft and intransigence of a grave marker." She admires the work of James Salter, whose heroines are"women in extremis, for whom all pretense has vanished," and the poetry of Sharon Olds for that"something subversive, even mutinous in the poet's unflinching child-eye." Always a teacher, Oates imbues each essay with a careful sifting of the evidence and consistently acute observations.

A top-notch literary talent invites readers to find new inspiration in these works, and in her own.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
Oates knowing and voluptuously inquisitive journeys through books reveal glimpses of her private self and map her inspirations and feelings of kinship with other writers. Her latest collection of reviews and essays is the most poignant, open, and trusting to date. The title, Oates tells us, refers to the imagined worlds limned by writers under her scrutiny, including Poe, Flannery OConnor, Shirley Jackson, Roahl Dahl, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Proulx. But rough country is also where Oates found herself when her husband of 48 years died suddenly in early 2008. Oates found solace in reading and in writing these illuminating and fluent essays. A relaxed yet erudite and exacting critic, she is nimble in her assessment of Nabokov and avidly forensic in her dissection of Salman Rushdie. Her keen eye extends to visual art, and her response to Annie Leibovitzs retrospective exhibition and book, A Photographers Life (2009), is clarion. Most captivating and poignant are Oates personal essays, particularly her gracefully revealing portrait of Lockport, New York Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable mso-style-name: Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow: yes; mso-style-parent: mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .0001pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family: Times New Roman; mso-fareast-font-family: Times New Roman;a place crucial to her exceptional sensibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)